Its All Just Names and Dates

There are many things I love about being a student of history. For instance, I love engaging in debate with fellow students about the “Revolution of 1800,” which brought Thomas Jefferson to the presidency. I also greatly enjoy spending hours reading books and essays and then discussing how each historian crafted his or her argument. I could go on about all that I love about being a historian-in-training because the pleasures of this field of inquiry are boundless.

As with any other academic field, there’s plenty of bad to go along with the good. Though there are plenty of irritants within the field that annoy and anger me (postmodernism being the most infuriating), there are countless attitudes and ideas outside the field that are just as if not more irksome.

What I am talking about is a total lack of knowledge on the part of non-historians (mostly lay persons) about what historical study entails. This is maddening by itself, but when it is accompanied by a sense among non-historians that they know what history is, well, that is just unbearable. Why do non-historians, the public in particular, feel the need to lecture me on what is history? A non-lawyer would not lecture a lawyer or a law student on how to file a motion to suppress. (Though I have seen people with no training in law attempt to lecture a law student on certain legal issues) A non-medical doctor would not lecture a doctor on how best to deal with a certain ailment. So why is it acceptable for non-historians to tell me what it is that historians do and what should be considered history?

One of the many things that non-historians say that annoys me is: “It’s the past and it either happened or it didn’t.” I have been studying history and working toward becoming a professional in the field for over half a decade now and I would argue that if study of history is that simple, then I have wasted years and thousands of dollars on training in this field. This may come as a shock to non-historians, but history is not that clear cut. It is not debating whether something happened or not. One can even argue, as postmodernists do, that we cannot truly be sure whether anything has ever happened. The line of thought that leads to the idea that something either happened or it didn’t arises out sheer ignorance of the past and its students.

Another misconception, which can be coupled with the above mentioned irritant, is the notion that history is the memorization of names, dates, and facts. When people find out that I am a graduate student in a history program they inevitably say either one of two things. One: “I always liked history because I was always good at remembering names and dates.” I would also hear the opposite statement: “I hated history because I wasn’t any good at memorizing things.” Once again, if the study of history centered on the memorization of names and dates, then I have been wasting much of my life in this field of study.

When it comes time for me to explain to someone that history is not as simple as they think I am usually met with blank stares. I inform people that I’m not spending my time memorizing trivia, but rather trying to understand how and why certain events happened. I studying the past in order to understand it and then explain it to others. I tell them that much of what I do is dissecting complex arguments and trying to construct arguments of my own. This is much different than the commonly held view of historical study. So, I am not surprised at the blank stares that greet this revelation. After all, the study of history in our public school system is atrocious. History classes in public schools are structured in such a way that students are only expected to learn names and dates. Not to mention most of the history that the public consumes is written by non-professional historians like David McCullough. Now, unlike other graduate students and professors, I enjoy reading the works of popular historians including McCullough, but these books just tell a story and don’t try to understand the past. Stories are for novelists to write and not historians. I am not a proponent of injecting historical writing with useless and dense theory, but a historian should at least make an argument and then support that argument with inferences drawn from letters, diaries, newspapers, and other primary sources.

I consider myself a populist when it comes to the writing of history. I am one of the few that believes that history should be written for the masses and not for a small population of academics. However, history should be done properly and if it is not then it can be of no use to the public. I also believe that non-historians can write and should be able to write history, but they should conform to the standards that professional historians set for themselves in their study of the past. All in all, I hope the public perception of the study of history changes, but it probably will not.